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GRAVY

My first novel started with a mole. Yes, a MOLE - a freckle, a birthmark, whatever you want to call it.

I was at the pool with my daughter getting ignored by our swim instructor when a lifeguard with a particularly ripped abdomen walked by. He stopped to flirt with one of the female lifeguards and my eyes flew directly to an adorable mole on the top can of his six-pack.

"How cute!" I thought (among other things). "He looks like a character in a romance novel!"

So I went home and started writing fiction for the first time. That was over a year ago and I still haven't been able to stop. GRAVY is the story of a suburban housewife who wants another baby, but gets a man with a mole instead.

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April 03, 2012

Art, work and chickens

My birthday was great. Rent is due on the first, so we didn't have much leftover and we chose to spend what we had on wine and food instead of presents (quelle shock!). Fortunately, Joel bought us a family membership to the Portland Art Museum a while back, so Sunday we took the kids to see Rothko and John Frame. If you're local, it's worth the price of admission. They arranged the exhibit in chronological order, so you could really see the development of his style. After announcing that "his paintings seem to be getting WORSE," this ended up being Alex's favorite Rothko:

And while Rothko was great and obviously the bigger name, John Frame's work is utterly life changing. I had never heard of him before (which is no suprise given how absolutely little I know about art) and seeing the haunting handmade world he's created was totally worth our membership fee. Here's just a taste of his video work - he makes all the sculptures himself, down to hand-stitching the doll clothes, takes all the photos himself and even writes the music. Sheer genius.

This week is Spring break for my kids and they're at Dave's. I would call this "unfortunate" because I miss them and it would be fun to have the extra time to take them to the beach or something, but the reality is that if I'd had them this week, it would have cost me a fortune in childcare since I'm getting busier and busier at work.

Have I mentioned how much I LOVE my job? I love my clients. I love getting to catch up with them for at least half an hour once a month. I love how hard I get to laugh and that I get to be totally and completely transparent. I don't have to put on my professional face and fake it, you know? I authentically love the work on every level and dude, you guys, I get to use TWEEZERS. It's pretty rad. My only complaint is that I want to work MORE. I'd love to be booked solid until July, but that's just a work-in-progress.

Unfortunately, after being at work for almost 12 hours yesterday, I came home to home to our first chick casualty. It was bound to happen and in fact, the feed store warned us that we'd probably lose at least one of them, but it was still sad. Especially since it was Allison! She was our special chicken because the top and bottom halves of her beak were completely crossed and that meant she could barely eat or drink. Joel called her "Short Bus."

Poor Genoa is going to be CRUSHED. She's becoming quite the little chicken farmer. We've moved the chicks into the bathroom downstairs and she will literally spend hours down there sitting with them and letting them peck at her feet. In fact, when she found out that we bought one of the chicks specifically to slaughter and eat, she got pretty upset.

"If you kill any of our chickens, I will punch you in the face, Mommy! IN THE FACE!" I give her about six months to make the connection between chickens and chicken nuggets. I'm gonna have a six-year old vegetarian on my hands. So I collected poor Allison from the bathroom coop, where her two sisters were hovering protectively near her body. Then it hit me: what exactly ARE you supposed to do with a baby chicken corpse? She's too big to flush. Too special to put in the yard waste bin. This might sound creepy, but Joel and I deliberated for a while and then decided to just put her in the freezer until the kids get home next week and we can throw her a proper funeral.